


Wing Thing

by battle_cat



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Aziraphale and Crowley Through The Ages (Good Omens), Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff, M/M, Pining, Wing Grooming, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 08:06:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23847907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Five times they opened their wings for each other, and one time they flew.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 262





	Wing Thing

**I.**

The first thunderstorm in the history of Earth is furious but brief. The demon Crawly watches it from under the shelter of a glistening white wing, the faint ethereal glow of it all the more visible against the slate-gray sky.

Funny, he thinks. He’d never noticed the glow in Heaven.

Next to him, the angel has his soft, round face tilted up toward the sky, water trickling down his cheeks. Crawly finds himself suddenly, strangely transfixed by the pale expanse of skin underneath the angel’s jaw, by the places where his damp robes cling to the curves and planes of his corporeal form: a well-muscled shoulder here; a plush swell of belly there.

“Seems like it’s letting up,” the angel says. He turns to look at Crawly, which makes Crawly instantly look away, for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. Odd set of instincts these human corporations come with.

The rain is indeed stopping. “I do hope they got somewhere dry, the poor humans,” the angel frets. “They don’t even have _clothes_ yet.”

_They have a flaming sword,_ Crawly thinks but doesn’t say. Nor does he say anything about the squirming tendril of guilt that couldn’t possibly be a physical sensation but sure feels like it in this corporation. He’d really just done the first thing he could think of—She doesn’t want them to eat the thing; I’ll convince them to eat the thing—and the results had been rather more dramatic than expected.

“Oh…I’m sure they’ll…figure things out,” is what he says out loud. “They are meant to be rather clever. From what I’ve heard.”

“Yes,” the angel says, as if reassuring himself. “Yes, quite.” He withdraws his wing, and only at that point does Crawly realize it had been radiating a faint warmth from above his head.

“So.” The angel shakes his wings dry with a flutter. “What now?”

**II.**

Their wings mostly stay tucked away in another plane of reality once the humans start building permanent dwellings. Human architecture isn’t really designed with sixteen-foot wingspans in mind.

In the rocky hills above Athens, an angel and a demon lounge at the edge of an olive grove on a warm late summer day, both pleasantly sloshed off a clay jug of wine that keeps miraculously refilling itself. Below them, the city swells with the sounds of a raucous festival in full swing, but up here, the only sound is the gentle susurration of olive branches.

During a momentary lull in conversation, Aziraphale gets mostly-steadily to his feet and arches his back with a grimace. His spine gives an audible pop.

“Ugh. Do _you_ get the most infernal crick in your back from keeping your wings hidden all the time?”

“Nah.” Crawly shrugs. Now and then over the years, he’s seen a human do something that makes him think he’s missed some crucial bits of information about how human skeletons are supposed to work. But if he’s fucked something up, he’s sure not about to be the one to call attention to it.

Aziraphale rolls his shoulders with a grimace. “Think they’ll notice if I…just for a minute…?”

“‘S reality, angel. They never notice anything.” Below them, the city’s inhabitants are busy drinking and feasting and dancing: slaves and free men, rich and poor, enjoying themselves like equals.

“Right, then.” He slides his wings into view with a sigh of relief. Fucking Heaven, Crawly had forgotten how _white_ they were, almost too bright to look at as Aziraphale stretches them up above his head, then forward, then folds them against his body, tips of the primaries just brushing the scrubby grass at their feet.

It’s been twelve hundred years since Crawly saw Aziraphale’s wings. He’d forgotten how beautiful they are.

They are also a terrible mess.

“Angel!” Crawly tuts. “Satan’s sake… When was the last time you groomed?”

“I…oh.” He looks back at his disheveled wings and frowns. “Can’t recall. They are in rather a state, aren’t they?”

“Ugh. Sit there.” He points to a soft spot on the grass, in front of a gnarled olive stump.

“What are you…?” Aziraphale trails off, but he’s already moving to sit where Crawly instructed. It involves holding his wings awkwardly out to the sides to avoid the ground, but eventually he settles cross-legged on the grass.

“What d’you think I’m doing, angel? I’m fixing them before _I_ start molting from secondhand embarrassment.” He sits behind Aziraphale on the stump.

“Are you, er…sure this is a good idea?” Aziraphale looks over his shoulder, his face crumpled with worry.

_It’s a terrible idea,_ some part of Crawly’s brain thinks. But he rolls his eyes and says: “You have someone else who can do this for you?”

Aziraphale sighs. “Oh…all right, then.” He stretches out his right wing so it’s hovering over Crawly’s lap.

He flinches at the first tentative touch to a ruffled covert, wing twitching forward and out of reach. “Sorry. Sorry,” he says. “Sensitive. No one’s, ah, touched them in a while.” He takes a deep breath and brings his wing back to its previous position, within Crawly’s reach but not quite touching any part of his body.

“Relax, angel,” Crawly says, although he’s the one whose fingers are suddenly trembling, frozen just above the glossy white feathers. “I’ve got you.”

Aziraphale doesn’t flinch at the touch this time. He does release a shaky breath when Crawly strokes a careful hand down the length of feather, smoothing out the disheveled barbs. 

Aziraphale’s feathers are incredibly soft, almost silky under his fingers. After a few moments his rigidly stiff posture relaxes, and he lets the weight of his wing rest on Crawly’s knees, heavy and radiating ethereal warmth. Crawly works through his feathers quickly but gently, trying to focus all his attention on the work and not on the sudden lump in his throat.

He remembers what it had been like, in the Before-the-Beginning: lounging in companionable piles with your workmates in between erecting galaxies, carding fingers through someone’s primaries while someone else did yours. Something so easy and natural you didn’t realize how much you were going to miss it, later.

Demons don’t groom each other. Any demon fool enough to willingly turn their back on another demon soon learns not to. Crawly had figured out how to take care of his wings himself, and if his human shoulders maybe aren’t supposed to bend quite that way, well, it’s not like anyone is watching him while he does it.

His wings are immaculate. It isn’t the same, though.

Aziraphale sighs, his shoulders relaxed and head tipped back slightly. His eyes are closed, dark lashes resting against pale cheeks. Sweet Satan. Crawly looks away from his face before he says something dangerous. “Good?” he ventures, hoping Aziraphale can’t hear the crack in his voice.

“Mm,” the angel sighs. “Forgot how lovely that feels. Not really the done thing in Heaven anymore.”

“Really?”

“Hm. Too many opportunities for…fomenting…or something.”

“Oh.” He swallows hard, not sure why it feels like a knife under the ribs, the idea that Aziraphale might be as starved for this as he is.

He’s reached the base of Aziraphale’s wing, where ethereal substance joins terrestrial matter, blithely ignoring any clothing atoms in the way. There’s a tuft of snow-white down at the wing joint, that spot where their human-approximating corporations strain at the shock of being joined to something otherworldly, and he shouldn’t—he knows this is asking for trouble—but he sinks his fingers into it before he can stop himself.

It is. _So soft._ His fingers’ Earthly synapses almost don’t know how to react to it. He bites back the noise that wants to come out his throat, finds the spots where wing joint meets corporeal flesh and digs his knuckles in.

Aziraphale _moans,_ the way he does when he’s savoring a new food that’s about to becomes one of his favorites, and then immediately blushes. Crawly bites down on the inside of his cheek.

For a moment neither of them moves. Crawly’s fingers are buried in unbearably soft down, his thumb resting against the thin layer of sun-warmed linen separating him from Aziraphale’s skin.

He’s the one to pull his hand away. Aziraphale draws a deep, shuddering breath.

His throat is dry. “Next side, angel,” he rasps.

“Right.” Aziraphale holds his wings carefully out to the sides as he shuffles over until his left wing is within Crawly’s reach.

“I could, um, do yours when you’re finished,” he says quietly as he settles into position. “Return the favor, you know.”

He doesn’t think he can survive Aziraphale touching his wings without thoroughly embarrassing himself in one of several equally mortifying ways.

“Nah,” he says, shoving it out around the desperate ache in his gut. “Mine’re fine.”

**III.**

1099 is a terrible year in Jerusalem.

At least, Crowley is pretty sure it’s a terrible year. He’s drunk for most of the second half of it, from the blood-soaked summer to the miserably cold and wet winter. (No one tells you that Jerusalem gets _cold_ in the winter.)

Later, he won’t be able to remember exactly how the fight in the tavern started. While starting bar fights between humans is all in a night’s demonic work, he doesn’t, generally speaking, intend to be _in_ the fights himself. That all seems rather crass. But he’s pissed and he’s _pissed,_ and there are far too many Crusaders around these days, and a sharp blade and the swagger of conquest don’t intimidate him.

He doesn’t realize he’s in trouble until the fight spills out into the rain-slicked courtyard, and all of a sudden he’s surrounded, six to one. Before he can concentrate enough to sober up, he’s on the ground, tasting blood in his mouth, and someone is kicking him in the ribs, and this isn’t the way he intended this to go at all—

The courtyard suddenly blazes with light, bright enough that he has to shield his face. Squinting between Crusader boots, he catches the outlines of a figure with enormous wings, a figure that looks otherwise mostly human until you catch it in your peripheral vision and glimpse entirely too many eyes.

The voice, when it speaks, makes his teeth ache.

_**IS THIS HOW YOU SERVE GOD** _

The humans in the courtyard are doing some truly satisfying shrieking and wailing. A few fall to their knees, and even in his bruised state Crowley can’t help sniggering.

_**BE GONE** _

They scatter, leaving Crowley in a heap on the frigid limestone.

“Crowley?” The ethereal light dims until Aziraphale’s face comes into focus. He looks extremely annoyed. “Goodness, are you all right?”

“‘M fine, ‘m fine.” Crowley hauls himself to his feet, wiping blood from his split lip. A moment’s focus purges the copious amount of wine from his bloodstream, which he immediately regrets because he gets several degrees colder and sorer. But at least now he can concentrate well enough to heal his various scrapes and bruises with a snap.

“ _Bloody_ Crusaders,” Aziraphale spits, tucking his wings away with an irritated flutter. “ _Holy warriors_ indeed.” The bitterness in his voice is something Crowley has never heard before.

He looks Crowley up and down. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Fine, angel.” He’s feeling more than fine now, except for the fact that he’d really rather still be drunk. But that’s a problem he can do something about.

“Fancy a drink?” he asks. “I’ve got quite a selection back in my rooms. Humans’ve got this new one now, made with anise seeds. You’ll like it.”

“Oh…that does sound intriguing.” He can see Aziraphale fighting a smile and tells himself it’s reserved solely for the prospect of trying a new libation. “Why not, then? Lead the way.”

**IV.**

“Just that guy? Are you serious?”

“Those were my instructions.”

“You’re telling me, out of all the poor sods on the western front, they are sending you to personally save one and only one particular person?”

“Yes.”

“What’s so bloody special about that guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“He earn some sort of get-out-of-misery-free-card somehow?”

“I don’t _know!_ ” There’s a raw edge to his voice, and Crowley immediately regrets pushing. “You know I’m not supposed to ask questions about these things.”

Aziraphale sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose as if he has a headache. The bookshop is dark except for a single lamp, turned low to conserve fuel. In the dim glow and reaching shadows, the angel looks tired, and worn down, and sad.

“I hate going to the front,” he says quietly.

“Yeah.”

“It’s just…there are just so _many_ of them, and they’re all praying _all the time,_ and I can hear _all_ of them…”

“I’ll go.” The words are out of Crowley’s mouth before he can think the better of it. “Let me do this one.”

He expects Aziraphale to go into the usual song and dance, refusing at first and then letting Crowley talk him into it, as if they don’t both know exactly how this is going to go. But Aziraphale just looks up from where he’s been staring into his tumbler of bourbon, his face weary and pale.

“Oh… You would…do that for me?”

“Course, angel. It’s no bother to me.” Crowley flashes a crooked smile over his own glass. “I can’t hear any of them.”

Aziraphale takes a sip of his drink before offering, gently: “I thought you couldn’t, though.”

He had learned the hard way that he couldn’t save or raise humans. Not because he is incapable of it—his abilities in that regard are the same as any angel. But because Hell would notice. On the one memorable occasion they had noticed, the consequences had not been pleasant.

“Can’t affect the human directly. But…there are ways around that. I’ll think of something.”

Aziraphale doesn’t look completely reassured, but he doesn’t press it. “It has to look, you know…properly angelic.”

“Don’t worry about a thing.”

He knows there are humans who think war was better back when men had to hack each other up face to face. Nobler somehow. It wasn’t. Every war is awful if you’re the one living through it. War hadn’t gotten worse just because humans could drop poison gas from airplanes now instead of catapulting diseased bodies over the city walls.

It had, however, gotten _bigger._

The western front is enormous, a vast expanse of trench-scored earth, fields churned to mud by three years of murderous advances and retreats, any previous geography pulverized beyond recognition. Flooded craters and the rotting corpses of men and horses are the landmarks now.

He glides low over the trenches, wings silent above the ground-hugging fog and blasted remains of trees. He can’t hear the prayers of the soldiers below him, but he can feel their wants, reaching and clawing like blind things, thin, desperate and constant.

_A good stiff drink. A letter from family. Mom’s Sunday dinner. Boots that don’t blister. A blanket without lice. A good fuck with my sweetheart back home. A good fuck with anyone. A leisurely shit without fear of mortars. A GODDAMN CIGARETTE. To be warm. To be home. To stay alive. To stay alive. To stay alive._

He ignores them. He drifts on, searching for the one man that Aziraphale had told him how to find.

He finds the man—boy; he cannot be more than nineteen—just as the other side is readying the predawn surprise attack. He is crouched in the forward-most trench, mud-caked and hollow-eyed, on night watch.

_Look angelic,_ Aziraphale had said. And angel or not, he knows how to make an entrance.

He descends, wings banked, hair streaming long around his face, clothed in voluminous black robes that swirl and ripple on their own, bare feet hovering an inch above the edge of the trench. The boy alone sees him, his watch-mates on either side noticing nothing. His mouth falls open, eyes wide. The rifle slides from his numb fingers into the mud.

Crowley doesn’t bother with _Be not afraid._ It’s a little late for that.

The boy gulps, staring up at him. “Are you…Death?” he whispers. He doesn’t sound surprised.

“Not today.”

Crowley spreads his wings to their fullest span.

The mortar that would have been a direct hit shatters against the invisible shield of metaphysical power around them, disintegrating into a shower of sparks that glitter like stars. And if the two soldiers on either side of the blessed man escape being horribly maimed by shrapnel, well, that’s just someone’s personal middle finger to the Great Plan.

**V.**

The day after the world doesn’t end, they linger at the Ritz so long that lunch service turns into to dinner. The waitstaff on the dinner shift find nothing unusual about their presence, so they order dinner, and dessert, and brandy.

When the dining room finally closes, they linger on the sidewalk outside the Ritz for an awkward moment. Aziraphale is the one who says, “Care for a walk?” sparing them both from admitting that after the events of the past few days, neither particularly wants to leave the other’s side.

And so they are walking in the park, on a clear late summer night, and at some point Aziraphale laces his fingers through Crowley’s, and neither one of them lets go.

Crowley is so distracted by the hand-holding that he hasn’t paid the slightest attention to where they are going, until the bandstand comes into sight.

He pulls up short. “Did you…mean to lead us here?”

“I haven’t been leading us any—oh.” Aziraphale seems to register where they are all at once. His gaze drops to the gravel at their feet. “Unfinished business, I suppose,” he says softly. He’s still holding Crowley’s hand.

“Angel—” Fuck, he doesn’t want to be here. Doesn’t want to rehash anything that was said here. Nothing good can come of that. “Let’s go somewhere else. We can—” He makes a vague waving gesture, trying to indicate…something, he’s not quite clear what—

Aziraphale catches his runaway hand, and now he is holding _both_ his hands, clutched warmly between their bodies. They are suddenly standing very close together.

“Crowley.” Aziraphale takes a fortifying breath. “I’m so terribly sorry—”

“No, listen, you don’t—”

“I said things I didn’t mean.”

“Me too. Look, we were under a lot of stress—”

“I thought—maybe I thought I was protecting you, somehow.” Aziraphale isn’t meeting his gaze, staring fixedly at their entwined hands.

“It doesn’t—”

“Please. Let me finish.” He bites his lip. The lamplight on his pale cheeks and thick lashes is abysmally distracting. “I didn’t mean what I said about us not being friends.”

“I know.”

“You are…my best friend.” Fuck, his voice is shaking. His thumb worries at Crowley’s knuckle. “And, well, I—I’m afraid I’ve fallen very much in love with you.”

And he chooses _that_ moment to look up, with his blue-green-grey eyes and cloudfluff hair and face full of tremulous hope, and anything Crowley might have thought of saying crumbles to pieces in his throat.

He doesn’t know which one of them leans in, or if it’s both of them at once, the inevitable decay of orbits after six thousand years of circling each other. But their noses are brushing against each other and then they’re kissing.

It’s far too many sensations at once—the softness of Aziraphale’s lips; the heat of his mouth; the tentative brush of fingers on his cheek; the charge of their bodies being so close together; the awkward shuffling and grasping (tilt slightly, shove sunglasses up into hair) until they figure out how they slot together. Aziraphale’s hands are on the back of his neck and curled into the fabric of his jacket, like he is something precious, something to be held onto.

They kiss until they’re breathless with it, and then, since they do not need to breathe, a good while longer after that. At some point they settle into just holding each other tightly, an angel’s face tucked into the soft hollow of a demon’s shoulder, and that feels like almost as much a transgression and a relief as the kissing.

Crowley’s throat is clotted with things he can’t say, about burning bookshops and pillars of hellfire and the tarmac of Tadfield Airbase cracking open under their feet; about _To the world_ and handholding on buses and _our side._ He can’t get any of them out, but judging by the way Aziraphale’s fingers are digging into his back, he thinks they are on the same page.

He doesn’t consciously make the decision to pull his wings into this dimension, but they arrive anyway, unfurling with a soft rush of displaced air. He is already holding Aziraphale as tightly as he can, and it doesn’t feel like enough, so he curls his wings around him too, wrapping them both in a curtain of black feathers: sheltered, and wanted, and safe.

**VI.**

Sitting at the very edge of a five-hundred-foot chalk cliff is the sort of thing that would be inadvisable for a human. It is fortunate, then, that no one pays the slightest attention to the two human-shaped metaphysical beings enjoying a picnic there as the sun sinks toward the sea on a warm summer evening.

“What d’you say, angel?” asks Crowley, lounging propped up on one elbow to catch the last of the sun’s rays. “Worth the drive?”

Aziraphale looks up from spreading Camembert on a cracker. “Well, I think those sheep may be traumatized for life—”

“Eh, they’re sheep. They’ve already forgotten it.” Crowley cocks his head to shoot a rogueish glance at Aziraphale over his sunglasses, only to be completely skewered by Aziraphale’s look of open fondness. Dammit. He’s still getting used to that.

“It is lovely.” Aziraphale is not paying the slightest attention to the sunset.

He has to turn his gaze back to the sea. “‘S not so bad, y’know, getting out of the city now and then.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale says. “I think I could get used to that.”

He takes a bite of the cracker and makes an indecent noise. “Oh, darling, you simply must try this, it’s almost as good as that one we had in Normandy that one time. 1807, was it?”

“Hnm,” Crowley shrugs. “Mostly remember the wine.” But he lets Aziraphale wiggle down next to him on the blanket and slip a dollop of creamy cheese between his lips.

One thing leads to another, as he knew it would. Several plates of hors d’oeuvres and the half-empty bottle of merlot obligingly move themselves out of the way of an extended interlude of snogging.

“You know what else they have here?” Crowley says when they’re lying shoulder to shoulder on the blanket some time later, as the first stars appear. “Other than sheep, I mean.”

“What’s that?”

“Thermals.” Crowley sits up and stretches his arms overhead, spine cracking audibly.

“The…underthings?” Aziraphale asks, confused.

Crowley laughs, a bright peal of delight that Aziraphale has been able to startle out of him more often these days. “No, angel. Different kind.” He gets to his feet.

Aziraphale understands what’s happening a second before it does. Crowley runs full tilt toward the edge of the cliff, pulling his wings into this dimension as he goes. He leaps straight off the edge with a delighted whoop and emerges a moment later, wings outstretched, gliding on a rising current of air.

“C’mon, angel, give it a go.” Crowley is grinning, swooping around in lazy circles, looking like he’s having the time of his life. He looks carefree and _happy_ in a way that Aziraphale doesn’t think he’s ever seen, and, well, the urge to join him is irresistible.

He backs up a few steps, fluffs his wings out into this reality, and runs for the edge.


End file.
